Dawson Filter as He Relates to ¡PAIN!

“And so the end.” Lance snarled through his face’s mouth, reaching for a razor from the barbershop’s best coffee table.

“Who taught you how to do sentences?” Babe Listowel asked, quite a bit more genuinely than one would expect.

Lance curled his fingers until he felt he could truthfully say “I am holding a razor, New York, and you can’t stop me this time around!” He raised the arm to which these fingers were attached, and chuckled, knowing that his mother would have wanted it that way. He forced Dawson Filter into a chair and spat “We can do this a way, or not at all; and don’t think for a moment that I’m not about to decide in favour of the former, you jazz-handed muffin bin!”

“Why are you doing this to me?” Dawson asked, out of desire to conform with all other torture victims.

“I do as I am told.” Lance murmured. “That’s not all of, it, I suppose. In truth, I have glaucoma in my left eye; and would the boys back at the office think if they found out? People make assumptions, you know. They’d all start to question my lifestyle, and then what? The names they’d call me, I bet some of them wouldn’t even be Lance. `Hey could you pass me that bottle of not glaucoma? Oh, wait, you don’t have one!’ Here’s not too bad, though, ’cause if anyone ever judges me, I can just shave the hair off their kneecaps.”

Dawson nodded, and turned his head to speak to Sylvester.

“Now, tell me what you know of walruses.” Lance continued, disregarding the expectations I created for Dawson Filter speaking. To at least partially restore your faith in me, I promise to give him a line in the next paragraph.

“Not much, they seem pretty good at stuff. I think they deal with anger well.” Dawson responded, eyeing Lance’s razor and thinking words.

“Don’t lie to me, man!” Lance steamed. “Walruses brought you where you are today, they gave you everything: power, fame, fortune; you have to know at least much about walruses.”

“No, Lance, they gave me none of the things, not one. How ever did you get caught up in all of this? The Illuminati for The Blind, the glaucoma, the torture, and all all o’ that?”

“My first mistake was being blind-”

“Does glaucoma matter to blind people?”

“On a social level, yes.” Lance replied. “Then, slowly I started to be named Luther Gigee F. Mansete O’Finn. That’s how they mark you. One day a van pulled up to my house, that was before I painted it, and a man walked out. Promptly after walking out, he walked toward my house, and my maid told me he wasn’t stopping. Now, by this point I’m thinking: ‘He’s really means to get all the way to my house’; so I clean up a bit, then I paint the house, and I hear the doorbell. It wasn’t too hard, on account of how it was ringing. I opened the door and said my pleasantries, and he his; we talked a while, and he invited me back into his van. ‘Yes’, I said, completely unaware that it was a portal to The Illuminati for The Blind headquarters. After a few months, I got to be named Lance again; they said ‘Luther Gigee F. Mansete O’Finn’ has served its purpose. Then I became a barber, which was a nice segue into the torture industry. Now that you know my life’s best story, would you mind finishing an sentence for me? Just remember that if you don’t, then ¡PAIN!. Walruses are widely known to…?”

“A preposition!” Dawson finished, placing a rather respectable amount of emphasis on the final “i”.

“No, you can’t-”

Dawson craned his neck to meet Babe Listowel’s eyes, and they both knew that no matter if ¡PAIN!, they would never stop sticking it to the system, and could never stop their quest to find and retrieve feelings’ true meaning, whether it took them to the Amazon Basin, or every barbershop under the sun, as long as it didn’t take them to a place where said meaning became apparent, in which case they decided that they might be able to find other things to spend their lives on.